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A new map, done up in blazing color, plots more than a decade's
worth of the massive fires that have hit the United States,
offering a revealing portrait of an increasingly common menace.

On a stark black background, complete with topographic features,
the map shows not only
where fires have burned between 2001 and July 2012, but also
shows their intensity, veering from a wash of purplish dots for
the smallest fires, up through stipples of red and smears of
searing yellow for the mightiest blazes.

The data, provided by two NASA satellites, were "about two mouse
clicks away," said John Nelson, the map's maker, and the user
experience and mapping manager for IDV Solutions, a Lansing,
Mich., data-visualization company.

For the purposes of his map, Nelson plotted only fires of at
least 100 megawatts (MW), and those for which NASA expressed at
least a 50 percent confidence rating. "I wanted to capture the
more meaningful fire events," he said.

Since it's hard to visualize what a megawatt actually
means— "I was asking myself, 'What the deuce is a
megawatt?'" Nelson said — he looked through Wikipedia for a
device to express the measure in a more concrete way, and settled
on the average summertime capacity of a nuclear power plant, or
about 1,000 megawatts.

A search through 2010 numbers from the U.S. Energy Information
Administration suggests that number — about 1,000 megawatts — is
a fairly accurate representation of average plant capacity over
the course of a year.

Although some of the burns captured on the map could be so-called
prescribed burns — controlled blazes that officials set to
clear out flammable tinder from fire-prone areas —all but the
tiniest fires are almost undoubtedly wildfires, and a time-scale
version of the map shows the number of fires growing over the
decade, a reflection of an alarming trend that fire researchers
know all too well.

Fiery uptick

"Fire activity has definitely increased in terms of overall
activity and acreage burned, and that's not just in the United
States," said William Sommers, a research professor at George
Mason University's EastFIRE Laboratory, and a former longtime
director of fire research for the U.S. Forest Service.

Sommers said that prescribed burns aren't likely to have
increased very much in recent decades because of strict
regulation at the state level — pollution laws limit the number
of burns allowed. In addition, he said, the preventative burns
are not nearly as powerful as wildfires, and NASA instruments
simply can't see them as well.

Sommers said that as people move into fire-prone regions, not
only are there simply more people at risk and more houses to feed
a monstrous fire if one should one ignite, but that it's also
harder to conduct crucial fire prevention measures near a settled
area. People don't want a prescribed burn in their backyard, he
said, "but reducing fuel loadings would be the key to any kind of
defense of a space."

The number of acres wildfires burn annually has doubled since
1960, according to a February 2012 report from the U.S. Forest
Service, which points to climate change as a big factor in the
increase. The report also says that
fire seasons are likely to become longer and even more severe
in the future.

"If you took housing out of the picture, just the fuels and the
climate change would still, I believe, be causing a major
increase in fire activity," Sommers said. However, he added, it’s
the proximity to human populations that brings the emotional
anguish and danger associated with fires, and pointed to the
tragedies played out in block after block of
incinerated homes in Colorado Springs this year.

"Most of your major, long-lasting fire events become news events
when they affect people," he said.

Nelson said he's looking forward to hearing what people have to
say about the map, which, he says, is simply a more aesthetically
pleasing way of presenting data that are already out there.

"If something is appealing it will land in front of more
eyeballs," he said. "And if you've got people looking at a pretty
important topic, when maybe they wouldn't have been looking at it
or thinking about it, then that's a good thing."